When Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin was announced at E3 2021, I and many others thought it looked like ass. The protagonist was visually indistinct, colors were muted, it’s developed by Team Ninja, Tetsuya Nomura had creative control, everything about it just screamed mediocrity. But then we saw game footage, learned about its features, and suddenly it was starting to sound really good.
But not me. I deliberately waited until the game’s price dropped before giving it a try, because I knew this was exactly the kind of game that would see one. I was cynical all the way up to finally playing it. And while it did surprise me in its quality, it’s definitely not a game I see myself replaying.
Final Fantasouls
Stranger of Paradise is built on the same engine that Nioh uses, and you can definitely tell. You have a basic attack, customizable special attacks, a block, a dodge, and a special block that restores MP. The special block is tutorialized like a counter, but functionally it’s just a regular block. Took me a few levels to figure that out.
You and the enemies have a break gauge. If you attack an enemy enough, you can break their stance and perform a finisher. This also regenerates MP, and will kill multiple enemies if multiple gauges are broken. But enemies can break your stance as well, which can be an annoying tradeoff. I’ll get back to that.
Stranger of Paradise also features a job system. This is what initially sold me on giving the game a try: You can equip two jobs at once, and can freely switch between them mid-combat & even mid-combo. There are starter jobs you unlock just by doing the main story, but the end of these basic jobs have full or partial unlocks of advanced jobs. This encourages you to play & level everything just to find out how new jobs play. Not only that, but advanced jobs have their own expert job unlocks at the end of their skill trees. It’s a daisy chain of job unlocks, and it’s incredibly satisfying.
What’s not satisfying is the equipment system.
Final Fantiablo
Just like Nioh, Stranger of Paradise is a Diablo-style loot fest. That’s not inherently bad, and it even has some good Diablo-like design. Stats on loot drops are consistent, so there’s no RNG hunt for the highest percent roll, and individual equipment is upgradable to kill RNG even harder. However there is a little bit of RNG in the form of the Affinity system.
One of the stats you can increase on jobs is something the game calls Affinity. It’s a percentage stat, which when increased can unlock passive boosts to your character associated with the job in-question. For example, high affinity on a magic user will increase your spellcasting abilities. These are all job-specific, but equipment can drop with random affinities tied to them. So you in theory you can lean into boosting the affinity on your equipped job, or gain the passive abilities of a different job. But this system falls short by the simple fact that affinity boosts just aren’t really worth it. I tried to pay attention to them & keep affinities high my first time, but it often left me worse off than if I just hit the optimize button to equip all the highest-level things. Additionally, if you’re playing alone, you have to gear up two NPC party members alongside yourself, and that gets tiresome fast.
This system could probably be fixed by condensing it. Jobs are color-coded based on their specialties (orange for tanky, red for hard-hitting, green for fast-hitting, blue for magic), and I think making them specific to roles instead of classes would make customizing them more appealing. The gear also has stats & names that imply they were meant to be role-specific at one point, and the optimize button even has some gear preference if you switch jobs around. Maybe tying role affinities to role-specific gear would better encourage optimization on the player’s end? I dunno.
My other point of negativity for SoP is the difficulty.
Stranger of Pain
This game is hard, and not in a fun way.
Being hard is not inherently a negative. I like hard games, and I can name several that I’ve beaten & would recommend. But what I do have a problem with is bad difficulty balance, and boy does this game have that.
Remember that break system I mentioned? Well, it doesn’t just go down when you block. It also goes down when you get hit normally, and from what I can tell there’s no difference apart from health lost. I’m not a fan of Hideki Kamiya style punishment for lack of perfection, and this is exactly the kind of system that reeks of it. But what’s frustrating is the game’s difficulty is almost exclusively caused by this break system.
It’s an unfortunately common design issue where a game’s easy mode is too easy, while the normal mode is too hard. But in Stranger of Paradise, the normal mode is too hard, and the easy mode is still too hard. I ended up turning on the game’s assist mode (which the game calls casual), and that is too easy. This is a prime example of why accessibility & difficulty customization is important. The difficulty isn’t caused by attack or defense numbers, but instead by a game mechanic I can’t turn off. One that would make the entire rest of the game a lot more enjoyable.
Would I recommend this game?
Honestly, not really. The job system alone is super good and made me gush to all my friends about it, but it’s trapped in an all-too-infuriating Diablo-Souls-like, in a franchise where difficulty is generally not the selling point. It’s probably easier & more fun if you have friends to play it with, but as a singleplayer experience it’s not one I plan on going back to.
